Brian Bradley
NS&D Monitor
8/7/2015
The concurrent timeline for building the Ohio Replacement ballistic missile submarine will impact the industrial base for the smaller Virginia-class fast-attack submarines, and Huntington Ingalls Industries is talking with the government about how to best complete concurrent work on both vessels as efficiently as possible, HII CEO Mike Petters said yesterday during his company’s second-quarter earnings conference call. “When you take a ship that is the size of Ohio and you put it into that base, it is going to have an impact on various parts of the base, so the discussions that we are having between us and our partner and our customer are all about how do we do all of the submarine work as efficiently as possible,” he said. “Without trying to handicap or predict how all that is going to turn out, I would just say we expect to be fully engaged in the production of submarines for this nation for the foreseeable future.”
While General Dynamics Electric Boat is the prime contractor for the Virginia-class and the Ohio Replacement, HII is a subcontractor and builds the Virginia and does engineering and design work for the Ohio Replacement.
Petters said HII is looking at how to adjust the submarine industrial base to support and keep on schedule construction of both programs. “[T]he realities of our preparations in the far drive you into the stovepipe sometimes, but even when you are in the stovepipe of a particular program you can still kind of stick your head up and look around and see what is happening across all the programs of similar types. … That is what we are doing.”
Petters echoed several Navy officials in saying that not funding the Ohio Replacement through a separate account could throttle other shipbuilding programs. If the submarine is funded through the normal shipbuilding account, it would have a “negative impact” on industry, he added. “Their schedules would be changed or not built at all, so as you try to handicap the success of any particular program in the next five to 10 years, it does not matter what the program is, you start with the question of how Ohio-class [Replacement] is being paid for,” Petters said. “It is that important to this industry to get that sorted out.”
The Ohio Replacement program is estimated to roughly cost $100 billion. The Navy plans to procure 12 boats starting in 2021, with a hopeful rollout date of 2031.